March 24, 2015
Lewis Center for the Arts presents
“The Dramaturgy of Political Violence: Ayad Akhtar, Aasif Mandvi, and
Muslims on U.S. Stages”
A panel featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Ayad Akhtar, actor/writer Aasif Mandvi,
playwright/producer Jamil Khoury, theater scholar Fawzia Afzal-Khan, and theater historian
Neilesh Bose
What: “The Dramaturgy of Political Violence: Ayad Akhtar, Aasif Mandvi, and Muslims on
U.S. Stages”
Who: Panelists include Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Ayad Akhtar, actor/writer Aasif
Mandvi, playwright/producer Jamil Khoury, theater historian Neilesh Bose, and theater scholar
Fawzia Afzal-Khan, organized by Afzal-Khan and Princeton Professor of Theater, Jill Dolan
When: April 6, 2015 at 6:00 to 8:00 p.m.
Where: Friend Center, Convocation Room (113), corner of William and Olden Sts.
Free and open to the public
(Princeton, NJ) Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, in collaboration with the
English Department, the Muslim Life Program in the Office of Religious Life, the Program in
Theater, and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, will present a panel on the
dramaturgy of political violence and Muslims on U.S. stages on April 6 in the Friend Center
Convocation Room (113) on the corner of William and Olden Streets. The panel will begin at
6:00 p.m. and feature Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Ayad Akhtar, actor/writer Aasif
Mandvi, playwright/producer Jamil Khoury, theater historian Neilesh Bose, and theater scholar
Fawzia Afzal-Khan. The panel is organized by Afzal-Khan and Jill Dolan, Professor of Theater,
Annan Professor in English, and Director of the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies at
Princeton. The event is free and open to the public.
The panelists will discuss a range of relevant contemporary theater and performance work from
both artists’ and scholar’s perspectives. Mandvi will read from his one-man play, Sakina’s
Restaurant, and from his recently published memoir, No Man’s Land. Akhtar will read from one
of his plays, which include Disgraced (which recently ended its Broadway run); The Invisible
Hand (which was recently produced by New York Theatre Workshop); and The Who and the
What. Afzal-Khan will discuss Mandvi’s and Akhtar’s work in the context of South Asian
Muslim diasporic theater in the U.S., as well as their place in post-colonial discourse, the
burdens of representation—given the limited number of South Asian artists with high visibility
in American culture—and how Mandvi and Akhtar occupy two different historical moments that
have differently shaped their work and careers. She will also discuss gender politics and how the
“dramaturgy of political violence” describes their work.
Bose will discuss the history of Muslim South Asian theater and performance on Western stages,
addressing the new avenues of inquiry these two artists have opened. Khoury will speak as an
Arab-American theater producer who co-founded Chicago’s Silk Road Rising theater collective
in response to the events of 9/11. He will discuss Muslim representations in American theater,
popular culture, and the media through the lenses of national security and Western notions of
democracy that often vilify Muslims. He will also discuss gay and lesbian representations in 20th
century America in ways that can be applied to current representations of Muslim characters.
The panel discussion will be moderated by Dolan and will conclude with a Q&A during which
the audience will be invited to pose their own questions to the panelists.
Afzal-Khan is a Professor of English and Director of Women and Gender Studies at Montclair
State University. She works at the intersection of feminist theory, cultural and performance
studies, and postcolonial studies. She created the first course on writings by and about Muslim
women at Montclair State and has published extensively on this topic. She is the author of five
books, including her recent controversial memoir, Lahore With Love: Growing Up With
Girlfriends Pakistani-Style. Afzal-Khan is a published poet and playwright, a contributing editor
to The Drama Review, and a trained vocalist in the North Indian classical tradition. Her current
research focuses on female singers in Pakistani popular culture.
Akhtar is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, screenwriter and novelist. His play, Disgraced,
which won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, is the story of a successful Pakistani-American
lawyer whose dinner party spins out of control amid a heated discussion of identity and religion.
He is also the author of the critically acclaimed, poignant coming-of-age novel, American
Dervish, which describes a family’s struggle to identify both as Muslim and American, one boy’s
devotion to his faith, and the sometimes tragic implications of extremism. The book was voted a
2012 Best Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews, Toronto’s Globe and Mail, Shelf-Awareness,
and O (Oprah) Magazine. As a screenwriter, Akhtar was nominated for an Independent Spirit
Award for Best Screenplay for The War Within. He has received commissions from Lincoln
Center and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
Mandvi is an Indian-American actor and comedian who is perhaps best known for his work as a
regular correspondent on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Mandvi received an OBIE award for
his critically-acclaimed one-man show, Sakina's Restaurant. His stage credits also include the
2002 Broadway revival of Oklahoma!, Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom,
Homebody/Kabul, Suburbia, Trudy Blue, and Speak Truth to Power. His film and television
credits include the title role in Merchant/Ivory's The Mystic Masseur; Music and Lyrics, on
which he worked with Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore; as well as Spider-Man 2, Freedomland,
The War Within, Sorry Haters, Sex and the City, The Sopranos, CSI, Law and Order, and ER.
Khoury is a playwright and the founding artistic director of the theater collective Silk Road
Rising, where he employs his experiences living in the Middle East and his eleven years as a
cross-cultural trainer and international relocations consultant to promote playwrights of Silk
Road backgrounds. As a playwright, Khoury focuses on diaspora and other Middle Eastern
themes, with a particular interest in the intersections of culture, national identity, sexuality, and
class. Khoury conceived of and curated the highly successful Silk Road Cabaret: Broadway
Sings the Silk Road. Khoury also conceived of, and was a featured playwright in, Silk Road
Rising’s production of The DNA Trail: A Genealogy of Short Plays about Ancestry, Identity, and
Utter Confusion. Khoury’s play Precious Stones won Gay Chicago Magazine's 2003 After Dark
Award for Outstanding New Work and has been performed in ten cities across the United States.
Bose is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at St. John’s University. He earned his
Ph.D. in history from Tufts University. As a historian of modern South Asia, he researches 19thand 20th-century nationalism, religion, and culture, and the decolonization process of the mid20th century. His other research interests include diasporas and migrations, popular culture, and
the philosophy of history.
Dolan received the 2011 George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for her blog, The
Feminist Spectator, where she posts regularly about recent theater, performance, film, and
television. She received the Distinguished Scholar Award for Outstanding Career Achievement
in Scholarship in the Field of Theatre Studies from the American Society for Theatre Research in
2013. She also received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women and Theatre Program
in 2011 and the 2011 Outstanding Teaching Award from the Association for Theatre in Higher
Education. Her books include The Feminist Spectator as Critic; Theatre & Sexuality; Utopia in
Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre; and The Feminist Spectator in Action: Feminist
Criticism for Stage and Screen, among others.
To learn more about this event and the more than 100 public events presented each year by the
Lewis Center, visit arts.princeton.edu.
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